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rglondon2020-02-10 02:10 pm
rowleybirkinqc) wrote in rglondon2020-02-10 02:10 pm
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New category "Tap Rooms"? But what even is a tap room?
Some places in RGL are said to be tap rooms, so I'm wondering whether we should have a dedicated "Tap Rooms" category. If we do, how should we define a tap room? Personal gut feeling? A scoring system based on how it meets given criteria? And what criteria?
My feeling is that a tap room is it's typically operated by and on the same premises as a brewery its purpose is as an outlet for its products, and the primary purpose of the premises is to brew beer.
An example of what I think is definitely a tap room: Southey Brewing's tap room off High Street Penge. It's a small bar in the same building as the actual brewery, even with an interconnecting door through which the actual brewers flit hither and thither. The bar is essentially functional, with rudimentary facilities, serving as an outlet for their own products.
And an example of something I think is definitely not a tap room: the Euston Tap. Although it has "tap" in its name, that's only because the Euston Tap is part of a chain which puts "tap" into their pub names.
How do other people define a tap room? There's this old blog post which suggests it's a room with a large number of beer taps, but I do think this is simply a misunderstanding, as does a commenter on that post; I wonder though whether the meaning of "tap room" has shifted over time, and perhaps it did once mean the room where the taps were (see "more example sentences" here on a site which seems to use a very dated corpus). I do like this definition from a brewery outside Chicago: "a place to taste and sample product from a microbrewery [typically] that produces its own beer in-house". Wikipedia has "A brewery tap is the nearest outlet for a brewery's beers. It is usually a room or bar in the brewery itself, although the name may be applied to the nearest pub. The term is not applied to a brewpub which brews and sells its beer on the same premises."
If there's a scoring system, criteria could include:
- Location (how near it is to the brewery, whether it's on the same premises, and whether the primary purpose of the premises is to brew beer)
- Products sold (how much of the drinks sold are produced by the brewery) (but would be perverse to include Sam Smiths)
- Operation (whether operated directly by the brewery, perhaps with crossover of brewery/bar staff) (unsure)
- Not a brew-pub such as the Florence in Herne Hill
...but one could get carried away with an ever more complicated scoring system, and just go by gut feeling after all.
What do you think? (I'm not confident I can construct a poll that could usefully discriminate between answers, so am being open-ended here!)
My feeling is that a tap room is it's typically operated by and on the same premises as a brewery its purpose is as an outlet for its products, and the primary purpose of the premises is to brew beer.
An example of what I think is definitely a tap room: Southey Brewing's tap room off High Street Penge. It's a small bar in the same building as the actual brewery, even with an interconnecting door through which the actual brewers flit hither and thither. The bar is essentially functional, with rudimentary facilities, serving as an outlet for their own products.
And an example of something I think is definitely not a tap room: the Euston Tap. Although it has "tap" in its name, that's only because the Euston Tap is part of a chain which puts "tap" into their pub names.
How do other people define a tap room? There's this old blog post which suggests it's a room with a large number of beer taps, but I do think this is simply a misunderstanding, as does a commenter on that post; I wonder though whether the meaning of "tap room" has shifted over time, and perhaps it did once mean the room where the taps were (see "more example sentences" here on a site which seems to use a very dated corpus). I do like this definition from a brewery outside Chicago: "a place to taste and sample product from a microbrewery [typically] that produces its own beer in-house". Wikipedia has "A brewery tap is the nearest outlet for a brewery's beers. It is usually a room or bar in the brewery itself, although the name may be applied to the nearest pub. The term is not applied to a brewpub which brews and sells its beer on the same premises."
If there's a scoring system, criteria could include:
- Location (how near it is to the brewery, whether it's on the same premises, and whether the primary purpose of the premises is to brew beer)
- Products sold (how much of the drinks sold are produced by the brewery) (but would be perverse to include Sam Smiths)
- Operation (whether operated directly by the brewery, perhaps with crossover of brewery/bar staff) (unsure)
- Not a brew-pub such as the Florence in Herne Hill
...but one could get carried away with an ever more complicated scoring system, and just go by gut feeling after all.
What do you think? (I'm not confident I can construct a poll that could usefully discriminate between answers, so am being open-ended here!)
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Edited to append an anecdote. Some years ago I was on a 200km audax (non-competitive [1] endurance cycling) with two other riders and all of us were struggling rather in the dark of the last 50km, both from tiredness and because two of us were leaking blood slightly (I had stabbed myself in the hand with a rivet the day before, so had a glove full of claret.)
Now, on these events, you visit a series of "controls" to verify you have not cut the route short somewhere, usually about half a dozen on a 200. Some are run by volunteers, but some are "information" controls, where you answer a question which is hard to answer if you aren't physically there.
On this occasion there was an info at about 185km asking which brewery operated the brewery tap at Furneaux Pelham. A degree of temptation was creeping over us; perhaps we'd stop for a pint and a bit of a rest, except there was a tacit acceptance we might perhaps then have more pints and not finish.
Anticipation was at a height just before we crested a small hill and found the answer was... Greene King.
On the plus side, we did finish the audax with plenty of time in hand. :-/
[1] Events have a minimum and maximum speed, but in Audax UK it is _forbidden_ to publish an order of finishers or finishing times.
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